Lockerbie: The Tragedy of Flight 103 - The Inside Story (1990, V

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100808

In 1988, Christmas was cancellet for many people: Pan American Airways flight 103, a Boeing 747 carrying 259 people, was bombed on a London-New York flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all on board, plus 11 people on the ground.

This almost unknown film goes back several years before the bombing, showing how Pan Am received numerous warnings without doing much to avoid them, except hiring phony security guards and dogs to make people feel falsely safe.

This is a gem for 'planespotters' and watchers of "Seconds from disaster". Lots of authentic footage of Pan Am's 747s and 737s. Also surprisingly detailed about how the terrorists cells worked and how well they were organised in many countries, among them Germany and Sweden. Western laws had not yet permitted the police to arrest people suspected of planning an act of terrorism, before any such act had been performed. The warnings even revealed that the bomb would be hidden in a radio cassette player. As a sinister coincidence, the brand would be the Toshiba "Bomb-Beat".

The bombing was said to be an act of revenge after the U.S. Navy shot down a civilian Airbus 'by accident' over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 on board, in July 1984. This atrocity received much less attention in Western media.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Once the world's most prestigious airline, Pan Am was almost in free fall at this point in time. Its dynamic president, Juan Trippe, left the airline in 1968 without grooming an heir, to face a stagnation in air travel combined with fierce competition. Top management was frequently changed, and losses accumulated to over 1 billion dollars. The Lockerbie disaster was the last nail in the coffin before the airline ceased operations in 1991.

This interesting film has never been released on DVD, but I managed to obtain a very good transfer from the pristine VHS I bought from the U.S. in 2004, in a CLEAN 6-head VHS player.

Very good VHSrip 688x432, original fullscreen, good simulated stereo sound.

MediaInfo analysis:
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 699 MiB
Duration : 1h 26mn
Overall bit rate : 1 136 Kbps

Video
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263)
Muxing mode : Packed bitstream
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 1h 26mn
Bit rate : 999 Kbps
Width : 688 pixels
Height : 432 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 1.593
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.134
Stream size : 615 MiB (88%)
Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 1h 26mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Stream size : 78.8 MiB (11%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 40 ms (1.00 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 504 ms
Writing library : LAME3.97

Source: VHS NTSC (note that PAL/NTSC will give no problems for avi files)

If you are not happy with the aspect ratio, adjust it to 4:3 in any other program than Windows Media Player. Good free player here:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/